Dear gods the spam flow has been insane these days. I've had a lot
of spam before, but I've never had to spend more than a full day deleting it before now. Didn't help
to have the power going out for a good day or so due to a rather severe storm, but let's look past my
burnt roof and my wated time, and get on to the lovely Q&A goodness, shall we?

Woke up with "I Am The Wind" from Castlevania: SotN stuck in my head, which
is odd for two reasons. 1) I haven't listened to it in a few days, and 2)
I've never played a Castlevania game before. I got curious about Cynthia
Harrell's other music, so I did a Google search, but didn't find much else
about her except songwriting credits. So I figured I'd do a Googleshng
search (if you'll pardon the pun) by asking you were all these singers come
from?

Some of them, like the ones Squaresoft finds for Final Fantasy and Kingdom
Hearts, are mega-superstars in Japan (and in the case of FF: The Spirits
Within, North America... so far, Lara Fabian is the only FF singer I'd heard
of before I found out she sang an FF song). But other companies seem to
grab people that no one has heard of. The Elsa Raven who sang If You Still
Believe in The Legend Of Dragoon seems to be a different Elsa Raven than the
one listed at the Internet Move Database, since the web sites I checked out
made no effort to even claim that the two are the same person. (They might
very well not be the same person, but I have never seen the actress Elsa in
anything yet, so I couldn't tell you.) And the vocals for Pure Again from
Breath of Fire III seem to be credited to Akari Kaida & Yoshino Aoki, on
approximately two websites, total. Either no one cares about non-Squaresoft
games, or everyone else finds singers who have never sung before, and never
sing again after the job is done. What're your thoughts? And would it kill
these companies to take a risk and hire someone outside of Asia (Darren
Hayes, for random example, ignoring that he probably can't speak Japanese)?

-CW

Googleshng:
Mega-superstars is a bit of a stretch I'd think. In any case though, the videogame industry isn't exactly
in a position to hire celebrities to do voice work. You have the occassional exception of course, but
most companies can't afford big names. They either get friends and employees to handle such things, get
some no-name singers (or voice actors) still trying to get somewhere in the business, or if they really
have the money around, they'll scrape up the cash to hire real established pros who you still haven't
heard of. I believe this covers the question on importing people too.

That's about the Ys of it.

Googleshng,

I'm confused! Is Ys VI coming out in America in November, or is that it's
Japanese release date?

--Irken Child has a positive hoard of games to drool over thanks to E3.

Googleshng:
September for PC, December for PS2 from what I can see, and yes, that's U.S. dates. It's been out for
almost a year in Japan.

Rumor Buster

Hello, Googs! Listen, I just went out and bought La Pucelle Tactics (As well as the Arc the Lad 4, the fourth Trigun DVD, and the first three Discs of Last Exile. Great show, and it makes me glad I got a job!) Anyway, the guy at the store, whose name I can't remember (The guy, not the store. The store's an EB Games) told me that Disgaea is being re-released. And that there's going to be stuff cut out of it in the re-release. I have to ask, what the hell? Is this right? And what exactly is being cut out? Because I want the full game, and I WILL go to the interweb to get it if I must. Help me Google, yeah, get her out of my heart.
Kenny the C.

Googleshng:
I'm going to go with "The guy at the store is an idiot who has no clue what he's talking about." Not
only do I not have a press release saying that, but I have a pretty nice inside feed when it comes to
Atlus, and of course EB's online store still has Disgaea in stock.

The Last Laugh:

On ce again, I appologize for the various technical difficulties that cropped up here. Expect a more
normal and timely column tomorrow.